Last Days (56 page)

When stray torch beams brushed against their icy still -

ness in the darkness of the drawing room, the chandeliers flashed shards of bluish light. Purifying rays soon shone and sparkled upon the hand-crafted oak bookcases of the library.

Ash, maple, and rosewood chairs in the morning room were quickly drenched with solar brilliance. The veneered teak of the boot room was made magical once again by their throw -

ing wide the drapes. Italian marble and the walls gilded with sculpted peacocks in the billiard room rediscovered their familiar burnish. And every room, immaculately preserved from better times, proved empty of life and the animation of those who masqueraded as the living. It encouraged Kyle to hope the building was empty of what they had come to find. That
it
had vanished, leaving only a scent and a few stains behind, as was often its wont. But if it had, what then?

Did he just lie and wait for his throat to be torn out one night by a dirty mouth?

Once Jed had bolted enough water from a black military canteen to satisfy his thirst outside the windowless swimming-pool room, the water within still and black beneath greenhouse walls of white steel and green glass, he said,

‘Things get too hot upstairs, we fall back down to the lobby.

Safe zone. But only on my word. No one turns tail until I give the get-the-fuck-out-fast sign.’ He winked at Kyle and said, ‘Oora!’

They followed him to the foot of the lobby staircase. Metal banisters chromed and gridded with a Charles Rennie 499

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Mackintosh pattern, pointed upwards to the first-storey landing, partially visible through an arch bordered with a white peacock tail and the now familiar initials of R.F.

‘Y’all ready for this?’ Jed whispered.

Neither Max nor Kyle answered him.

‘Windows upstairs are shuttered. And locked. Ain’t gonna have time to cut them all open, so it’s torches and the camera light from now on. Night vision and flares as backup. We do it room by room. Same as down here. Until we find the queen of the hive.
Capiche?
’

The connotations of the word
hive
made the strength liq-uefy in Kyle’s legs. Max didn’t seem to be faring much better on the
stones
front. But Jed maintained the confidence and self-assurance of the professionally fearless, or the plain psy-chopathic. And took the first step up there.

They passed through the regal arch and entered a long corridor that ran between the exterior walls of the house, facing north and south. In the thin beams of light from the handguns and camera, every room on the long passageway was fronted with a closed white door, inset between walls of luxurious cream. ‘The guest bedrooms,’ Jed muttered. ‘Wonder who’s staying over, eh Spielberg? Want to go see if they want an interview?’

‘Jed!’ Max hissed.

Occasional drifts of dusty light from the lobby below, filtered up and faded about them, as if distant hatches had been opened in some great surfacing submarine, only to reveal little more in any detail than their feet on the red carpet; the light from below barely made it further than ten feet on either side of them. At both far ends of the corridor, torch light 500

LAST DAYS

revealed a great nautical window concealed by a locked shutter. Modern additions. Preparations.
Chet
. It seemed the man had desired a permanent end to light in his home. Other passages turned off the main concourse before they met the far walls.

Kyle switched the camera spotlight on.

Jed turned the handle of the nearest room. ‘Locked.’

‘We need to check them all?’ Max said.

And then they heard it. Ten feet inside the first corridor: above them. Whistling down the staircase from the floor above. Shot from a mouth none wished to see open. A long avian call that cut to a nasal whine. Kyle knew the sound well; had been chased out of the house on Clarendon Road by something similar.

In response, another whine, more sibilate and canine than birdlike, issued from much further away, perhaps above them, somewhere in the distant confines of the dark house.

Jed and Max both peered at the staircase that led up to the next floor, their eyes wide and guns raised. Max’s business hand trembled like he had palsy. And once their torch light vanished from where they stood, an intense blackness rushed in and filled the space around Kyle. Which he remedied by flashing his camera down the passage in the other direction.

Something rushed through the far reach of the camera light beam at the end of the long corridor. A scampering. Accompanied by the sudden glimpse of a figure on all fours, thin as a greyhound but trailing cloth long and white. ‘Guys!’ It briefly turned its eyes to him; distant and opaque, a suggestion of blindness. A dark head draped wisps of colourless hair.

Jed and Max spun about and aimed their lights at where 501

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the camera attempted illumination. And lit up an empty corridor. ‘What was it?’ Max said with a stammer.

Kyle peeled his tongue from the roof of his mouth. ‘One of them. In . . . In . . . I don’t know. Something white.’

‘Gone now,’ Jed said. ‘They know we’re here. Which way did it go?’

Kyle swallowed. ‘Left. Towards the back.’

‘These floors are built like a ship’s decks. Corridors run around the inside of the building’s outer walls. If these doors are locked, they ain’t got much choice on where to run. Floor plan is a big square. So we smoke them as we go. Come on,’

Jed said and stalked down the corridor quickly, forcing them to hurry behind him. ‘Max in the rear. That way, ain’t nothing gonna take us from behind.’

Kyle thought Jed had just outlined the dimensions of a place perfect for entrapment, but was too tense to speak up.

Until Max overtook him. ‘Max, watch behind us. Behind us!’

But Max was intent to push past him to get into Jed’s slip-stream, leaving Kyle vulnerable to the darkness behind, and what he could vividly imagine crawling through it.

‘Keep formation, Max.’ Jed called out, but quietly.

‘Yes. Yes.’ Max obeyed, but no longer seemed entirely with it.

At the end of the passage, Jed looked both ways quickly.

Then turned and ran to the left and disappeared from sight.

Left them behind. They heard his feet bump away quickly, the light from his torch dimmed to nothing.

‘Jed!’ Max cried out, a squeal in his voice. ‘Quick, follow him!’

But it seemed that not all of the doors to the guest rooms were locked. The sound of one opening behind Max in the 502

LAST DAYS

dark nearly made Kyle faint away from the world. They turned at the same time. Their frail white lights raked through the unlit burrow behind them. ‘Oh, Jesus,’ Kyle said.

Max fired three shots indiscriminately. A puff of plaster exploded from a wall. The carpet ruffled. But the thing rising to its feet from the floor never flinched. The dry mouth that opened was black inside, toothless. And for a moment neither of them spoke, and the gun was not discharged, and even the earth seemed to stop turning as they gaped at what it had draped upon its foul head and body.

A white wig. Lopsided above a shrunken face, its features diminutive like a chimpanzee’s and as black as ancient leather. Emaciated remains of a small man, who looked to have been busy in a dress-up box. They studied it moment -

arily, with a grotesque fascination. Looked appalled at its apparel, the satin nightie stained down the front with old blood. Until it screamed with rage, like an ape, and came at them on fleshless legs thin as bamboo.

‘Shoot!’ Kyle bellowed.

Max did, twice. But missed, putting two rounds in the wainscoting four feet above its tatty head. After that Max threw his hands up and over his face and screamed. Kyle tripped over his own feet and sat down with a cry.

It was reaching for Max when it suddenly drew back, as if yanked on a rope from behind. Its bony feet left the carpet.

It jerked in mid-air, then dropped hard, to pursue an inter-mittent twitching on the floor.

‘There was me thinking Spielberg would flip out first. Goddamn it, Max. That’s five rounds going south at fifteen feet.’

Jed stepped around where Kyle still sat on the floor in shock and walked straight past Max to where the thing quivered 503

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on its back. The light from Jed’s torch made it raise its groin as if in some horrible provocation. Jed stamped on its throat and fired from close range into its face. Its limbs fell still. ‘It’s wearing a goddamned dress. And a friggin’ wig, like some bony faggot. Looks like a bitch. Though you can’t tell and I sure as shit ain’t rooting in its panties.’

Max was insensible with fear and leaning against a wall.

He bent over and was sick onto his legs. Jed shook his head in dismay. ‘Hey Spielberg, can I trust you with a bit of firepower? Max is strictly intel-gathering from here on.’

‘You bet.’

‘Get your light on this, Spielberg.’

Kyle moved on wooden legs to the corpse. Jed opened his rucksack and fished for the third Gloch. Kyle concentrated the camera on to the thing’s face, open now and glistening like the broken husk of some leathery fruit. Before his eyes and the camera’s light, its entire shape perceptibly dried and withered within its loose apparel.

‘You get it?’

Kyle nodded. ‘Yes.’

‘Fucker’s gonna be dust in about twenty seconds. Max, can you get your shit together enough to salt this piece of crap and make sure?’

Kyle looked at him. ‘What about the other one?’

Jed was already flashing his light back and forth, back and forth, around their position in the corridor. ‘Got away. Won’t get far. Let’s move out.’

‘They’re dressing. Dressing?’ Kyle said as he moved after Jed. The Gloch, with the safety clicked off, was now re

-

assuringly heavy in his trouser pocket. Max followed them, wiping at his mouth with a handkerchief. ‘They mimic life.

504

LAST DAYS

Which means they have been here for long enough to copy what they once were. They’re being sustained.’

‘Sustained how, Max?’ Jed called back. ‘By the darkness?’

‘I don’t know. But a lack of light wouldn’t be enough to keep them here. Their presence doesn’t last long. In my rooms they would come and go within minutes.’

‘Which is all it takes to get fucked up by one of them. Eyes and ears, men. Eyes and ears. This ship could be full of rats.’

They nearly walked right under the next old friend, without realizing that it had clasped itself to the ceiling behind an ornamental light, tight inside the second turning on the first storey, to lie in wait.

Jed shot it three times before Kyle even got his hand to the thigh bulging with handgun. It let out a scream he was sure had perforated an eardrum. He and Max clutched their ears as it hit the carpet with a muffled clatter of bone in fabric. The sound of the world went underwater like his head was submerged in a pool. Jed grinned, his eyes wide like an excited drunk, or an unmedicated lunatic. ‘Real close, eh boys?’

And this thing was draped in a long gown. Some kind of sleeveless nightdress, or long slip, with a lacy neck, which hung loose about petrified collarbones, beneath a throat no thicker than the neck of a guitar. Like the other one, the front of its commandeered outfit was soiled with blood. ‘These mutha fuckers been feeding on someone, Max.’

‘Jesus Christ,’ the executive producer of the quickly derailing production whispered. His throat worked up and down in panic.

And the sound of gunfire, and of the agony of their own, seemed to have projected outwards far enough to reach other 505

ADAM NEVILL

sets of desiccated ears. At the next bend on the first floor, either above them or even on the same floor, they heard a series of bangs amidst a surge of whistling shrieks. At least two doors slammed shut in the distance.

Kyle was too frightened to speak. Jed’s arm roared into the air, held aloft a flare to momentarily blind them all with a phosphorescent burst. It carried through the corridor the entire length of the building’s rear. ‘Shit,’ Jed said.

Something on all fours, as thin and naked as the embalmed corpse of the Egyptian priest Kyle had once seen at the British Museum, crouched down and clawed at its face about thirty feet ahead of them. Behind it, the suggestion of other thin silhouettes, though it was impossible to deduce how many in the encroaching darkness, retreated like crabs from the flare.

Terrible shrieks and hoots filled the corridor.

‘Come on,’ Jed said and carried on, his magnesium flickers thrown forward. Ahead of them sharp feet clawed away, either disappearing back inside the rooms they had emerged from, or fleeing around the next bend to lie in wait.

Jed stopped. Inside the next room on their left, something thrashed about the walls until it settled for the frantic slap of dry hands against the inside of the door. ‘Back up. Back up.’ Jed reversed two steps into Kyle’s camera. ‘’Less that thing has got a cannon in it, Spielberg, you need to put the toy away and draw down in here.’

‘Behind us!’ Max faced the way they had come, his light flashed off the walls, carpet, and ceiling behind them, and eventually found the far wall that leaped with indistinct shadows. ‘I saw something.’

‘Shit. There’s too many of them. We walked into a friggin’

ambush. They could come out any of these doors. We need 506

LAST DAYS

more bodies. Assault rifles.’ They retreated back to the last turn in the corridor. Jed’s flare showed it empty. ‘Shit, they’re fast.’

Kyle was grateful for the brief return of his rage. ‘It’s too much for three of us, Max. You fuckin’ idiot!’

Max’s sweating face moved closer to the light in Jed’s hand. ‘We have to finish it. She’s here. It’s the right time.

They’re guarding her.’

Jed didn’t seem so sure. ‘Take another clip, Spielberg.’ Jed unclicked a magazine from his utility belt, quickly showed him how to load it into the gun. ‘Real tight till you hear the click.’

‘Gottya.’ Kyle tried to keep his hands steady. Had stuffed the camera back into the rucksack, and now wondered whether he’d switched it off.